Son of a Jige-Rōnin: The Man Who Rose from the Lowest Stratum

In 1835 (Tenpō 5), at Aki in Tosa Province (present-day Aki City, Kōchi Prefecture).

Iwasaki Yatarō was born into a house called jige-rōnin. A jige-rōnin was the lowest stratum of the Tosa status system — a house that, once gōshi, had in its poverty sold off its warrior status and fallen all but to peasants.

From the time he was born, Yatarō bore the humiliation of low status. But this very humiliation would become the driving force that moved the man who would later build the greatest wealth in Japan.

Yatarō's boyhood was poor. But his zeal for learning was greater than anyone's, and his talent was known early.

In his youth he went to Edo to study, but was summoned back to Tosa, implicated in an incident of his father's injury, and even tasted the misfortune of imprisonment.

In the jail, it is transmitted, Yatarō learned arithmetic and the wisdom of commerce from a merchant in the same cell.

Even the experience of rock bottom, Yatarō turned into his own nourishment. His indignation at low status and poverty nurtured a burning ambition within him.

Yatarō's turning point was having his talent for learning recognized by Yoshida Tōyō, a man of power in the Tosa domain.

Distinguishing himself among Tōyō's disciples, Yatarō was employed by Tōyō's nephew Gotō Shōjirō.

Under Gotō, Yatarō came to take charge of the Tosa domain's trade affairs in Nagasaki and Ōsaka.

Moving the domain's ships and goods and dealing with foreign merchants, in this practical work Yatarō gave full play to his commercial talent and found the road to making his way by the economy.

To make his way in the world by commercial talent and the abacus, not by military force or pedigree.

Yatarō's way of living was a scathing counterattack against a feudal society in which status decided everything.

Precisely because he was born in the lowest stratum, there was nothing to lose.

There was only the burning obsession to rise. From the Bakumatsu into the Meiji, the age of upheaval in which the order of status was collapsing gave opportunity precisely to men like Yatarō.

The son of a jige-rōnin would in time, with that obsession as his weapon, race up into a giant presence carving his name into the economic history of Japan.